"Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home, / Your house is on fire, / Your children shall burn!"
Our smart homes are crowded with smart gadgets and appliances. Was just wondering, is it safe enough? Let's do something to make our home both smart and safe. We'll build an internet enabled (IOT) smoke and fire alarm to send SMS notification and to trigger alarm with flashing red LED if it detects smoke and leakage of combustible gas.

After a long day at office, wouldn't it be great to step into a cool room without having to wait for the air conditioning to start functioning? I am sure all of us has unlocked the just locked door to double check if the electrical appliances have indeed been switched off. For ones who own a personal garage, it would feel great to watch the garage door open as you drive in without having to step out of your car. So lets explore a home automation use case that would map the switching on/off of appliances with the entry/exit of a preset geofence (virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area).

This is my first post on home automation. As a 'Hello World' project, switching on/off a bulb is a common use case. This post is not an exception. But to spice it up, we'll use MQTT (MQ Telemetry Transport) - a machine-to-machine (M2M)/Internet of Things (IOT) connectivity protocol and an android app (IoT MQTT Dashboard). Bulb is merely a symbolic representation of an electrical device. We can practically control any device (Internet of Things) over internet.

ESP8266 can act as both Station / WIFI client (STA_IF interface) and Access Point (AP_IF interface). AP_IF interface is active by default in MycroPython firmware on ESP826 . In the earlier post, we connected to the access point (AP mode) of ESP8266 and used WebREPL to remotely control switch on/off and brightness of an LED. Now, we'll configure the ESP8266 (as WIFI client) so that it connects to the WIFI router automatically after booting.

WebREPL daemon auto-start is disabled by default in MycroPython on ESP8266 for security reason. Here, we'll enable the same, connect to the REPL over WIFI using locally installed WebREPL client and run a "Hello World" program remotely on the chip.

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